


Your Name On My Lips, Your Scars On My Heart

by IronicAppreciation



Category: South Park
Genre: Aged-Up Character(s), Boys In Love, Domestic Fluff, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Friendship, Idiots in Love, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Pining, Slice of Life, Stan simping for eighteen years straight, fucking nerd, holy shit the pining, so soft, this is my comfort ship okay, very little angst dw, what a BOTTOM
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-21
Updated: 2020-06-21
Packaged: 2021-03-04 10:48:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,695
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24848551
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IronicAppreciation/pseuds/IronicAppreciation
Summary: It’s kind of perfect, his tipsy mind supplies, this arrangement they’ve got going on. After all, Stan’s body is always radiating warmth, and Kyle is always, always cold.
Relationships: Kyle Broflovski & Stan Marsh, Kyle Broflovski/Stan Marsh, Style - Relationship
Comments: 3
Kudos: 88





	Your Name On My Lips, Your Scars On My Heart

“Promise not to laugh at me,” Kyle prefaces, fingers interlacing with Stan’s on the grassy green earth as his free hand lifts a bottle of cheap peach schnapps to his lips. Stan watches as he takes a swig of the low-quality liquor and grimaces distastefully. 

“I won’t laugh,” Stan says, even though they both know that’s not a promise he can keep, especially when what Kyle is about to say is so embarrassing, he’s felt the need to include a disclaimer before saying it. He gives the other boy’s hand a light squeeze and positions himself a little bit closer as a breeze picks up around them, grinning to himself when their shoulders touch and Kyle reflexively leans into the newfound contact.  _It’s kind of perfect_ , his tipsy mind supplies,  _ this arrangement they’ve got going on. After all, Stan’s body is always radiating warmth, and Kyle is always, always cold. _

Kyle hums a bit to himself, thoughtfully pursing his lips against the mouth of his bottle. His untamable frizzy curls fall obstructively into his face, a curtain of red that he has to shake out of his eyes every now and again. He’s  _ finally _ stopped wearing that godforsaken ushanka at every waking moment, thanks to literal  years of badgering on Stan’s part. The other boy’s thrilled expression at the sight of his emancipated hair is almost worth the expounded ridicule he now faces from a certain someone every single goddamn day. 

Kyle’s eyebrows furrow, and he unconsciously rests his head on the edge of Stan’s shoulder. 

Stan wonders if he can feel his heart about to  _ burst _ from where he’s sitting, can hear its erratic thrumming through that messy mop of hair, tendrils of which now tickle his neck in a manner that is all at once excruciating and also  so very welcome. 

“I guess,” Kyle murmurs, his words slightly slurred, cheek pressed up against Stan’s forearm and the hand that was previously clutching the now empty bottle of booze sitting delicately at Stan’s wrist. His pointer finger absently draws indecipherable doodles and traces nondescript swirly patterns along the inside of Stan’s arm, running gingerly over the raised lines of old scars. The gentle, barely-there brushes send shivers up Stan’s spine; the lovely kind that make him want nothing more than to curl up impossibly closer to the other boy and assuage his desperate, unyielding desire to be touched. “I guess it was when you called that jewelry show guy, the one who was scamming your grandpa and all those other demented old people? It was when you called him and told him to kill himself on live television. That’s when I knew.”

A beat passes. A moment after he says that in which neither of the boys makes a single sound, in which the universe itself halts and holds its breath and all that exists in the world are Stan, and Kyle, and their interlocked hands. 

And then, Stan breaks his promise. 

The laugh bubbles up and spills out of his lips like a leaky faucet spewing water, and soon enough, Stan is curled in on himself, shaking from head to toe and trying in vain to remember how to breathe as his entire body is wrought with uncontrollable giggles. 

Kyle sits up indignantly and glares at him, looking as betrayed and incredulous as he can manage to look while he’s basking in the contagious glow of the other boy’s mesmerizing laughter. He snatches his hand away, socking Stan hard in the shoulder. 

“You asshole, you promised you wouldn’t laugh!” He snarls, although his biting tone lacks any real malice. The slightest hint of a grin threatens to lift at his lips, and Kyle forces it fervently away, doing his best to look as pissed as possible. 

“I’m sorry!” Stan wheezes, not sounding sorry  _ at all _ , his eyes squeezed shut and his hands grasping tightly at his knobby knees in an effort to stop his inane trembling, “It’s just— _ dude _ , that is  _ not _ what I was expecting.”

Kyle rolls his eyes, settling back into Stan’s side once he’s stable enough, although slight shivers still wrack the span of his lanky frame. Both his arms wrapping around one of Stan’s, Kyle rests his chin on the other boy’s shoulder and looks scathingly up at him. “Yeah, well,” he says, the vibrations of his voice murmuring through the boy’s skin where his jaw sits against Stan’s clavicle, “when did  _ you _ know you were in love with  _ me _ , huh, Casanova?”

Stan makes a contented noise deep in his throat and unfurls himself, beaming as he finishes off his now-lukewarm drink. “Oh, I’ve always known I loved you,” he says simply, winding up his hand to take one of Kyle’s and bring it up to his mouth, planting soft, sloppy kisses on each of the boy’s freckled knuckles. 

Though momentarily distracted by the swell of affection that flutters in his gut, Kyle is understandably put off by his boyfriend’s less-than-satisfying response. 

“Oh my  _ god _ ,” he groans, unlatching himself from Stan just enough to fix him with his most withering stare, “what a load of horseshit! That’s a cop-out answer and you know it!” 

Stan simply shrugs, long since immune to the other boy’s accusatory glowers, and takes to pressing butterfly kisses up the length of every individual finger on Kyle’s hand. “It’s true,” he mumbles against the tip of his pinky, smiling like an idiot when Kyle flails to retract his hand from his boyfriend’s adulating grip. 

“Fuuuck  _ you _ ,” Kyle drawls, not buying the other boy’s sappy, pseudo-romantic bullshit for even a minute, “I gave you a real answer. You owe me one, too.” 

Stan glances at him, at the sliver of moonlight reflecting off his hazel eyes and the cold-tinted pink of his nose and ears, and the goofy grin on his face droops ever so slightly. “Fine,” he says slowly, picking himself up and turning a bit to face Kyle properly. “You want a real answer?”

Kyle nods, and his curls bounce with the movement of his head. “Yes please,” he says, mirroring Stan’s adjustments so that he too is facing his boyfriend head on. 

Stan averts his eyes, wearing a small, sad smile and picking at the scabs on his arms. Kyle glances down at the alarmingly destructive habit, about to pull his hands away when the other boy speaks up softly. 

“It was when I turned ten,” he says, the slightest of tremors wavering in his voice, “and my parents got divorced,  _ again _ , and you left me for fucking  _ Cartman _ .” He says his friend’s name as if it’s poison on his tongue, and Kyle winces, biting down on his lip and gently wrapping his hands around Stan’s, rubbing small circles into the boy’s skin with his thumbs, keeping their interwoven fingers elevated so he can’t scratch at his arms. “And I realized, that, up until that point in my life, through all my family’s weird shit, you’d always been there. You were like, my lifeline, through all their stupid drama and insanity. And, without you, I just kinda...drowned, in all of it.”

Kyle feels his blood go cold, and he clutches to Stan just a little bit tighter to ensure that he’s still there. The warm, floaty sensation that’s been traversing through his body ever since the alcohol took effect evaporates almost instantly, the painfully evident presence of two angry, jagged lines running the length of Stan’s forearms having a startlingly sobering effect on the other boy. It seems as though Kyle can’t go a day, hell, even an  _ hour _ , without a brutal reminder of how fragile and fleeting this whole thing is, how unbelievably lucky he is that Stan’s still here at all, that his hands are even his to hold. 

He opens his mouth to say something but finds it empty, his lips dry. Stan continues, still not meeting his gaze. 

“I realized that I could get through all of it, could manage anything the world threw at me, if you were around for me to lean on. But there was no way, no way in  _ hell _ , that I could ever survive without you. That’s when I knew, I think. Or at least, when some part of me knew. It’s not exactly a normal sort of dependency to have on a best friend.” 

His voice tapers off and he glances down at his hands, still clutched in Kyle’s. The cool nighttime breeze blows his shaggy black hair into his face and he doesn’t bother shaking it away. Kyle gnaws once again at his bottom lip, wracking his annoyingly inebriated conscience for something appropriate to say. 

“I’m sorry,” he eventually settles on, even though it comes out lame and hollow and doesn’t sound sincere at all. Stan laughs. 

“What the hell are  _ you _ sorry for?” He asks, finally looking up at his boyfriend, that sappy, sweet smile returning to grace his features in a way that makes Kyle’s heart thump boldly in his chest, though the bitter air of defeat lingering stale in the silence between them isn’t lost on him. It remains unsaid, but Kyle knows precisely what Stan’s murky blue eyes don’t betray:  _ it’s too late to be sorry now _ _._ “I’m the one who took a nosedive into crazy-ville and kept you strapped in for the fall like some kind of gigantic leech.” 

“I was a bad friend,” Kyle says, and it comes out clipped and croaked, and he  _hates_ how hard it still is to talk about this, hates this barrier between them that no amount of kissing or sex or closeness can seem to break down. This fucking wall that he himself built, brick by hideous brick, without ever realizing it. “I could’ve handled it better. I could’ve  _ been _ better.”

Stan shakes his head ruefully and tugs Kyle’s hands in close to kiss them again. “We all could’ve been better,” he says, and it doesn’t justify it, it  _ doesn’t _ , but it means something all the same. 

Kyle looks at Stan and Stan looks back and the stars hang in the sky, peering out from behind a flurry of dark clouds, and the world is as it always is: cold, and uncaring. The universe could never, would never stop for them. Would never be merciful enough to give them back the time that they lost, to afford them a small reprieve in which to tear down that  _ stupid _ wall while the rest of the world waited patiently for them to catch up. 

But that doesn’t matter. Because even if the universe doesn’t care, there are people in it that do. And there’s no barrier in the world that can hold back the tidal wave of love that Kyle is willing to pour into Stan’s sad ocean eyes until he can pick himself back up again. Nothing that can make him ever even  _ consider _ leaving before his job is done. 

Kyle is annoyingly stubborn, after all. He always has been. 

He smiles and shivers at the feeling of the other boy’s breath fluttering over his knuckles, scooting closer and gently prying his fingers out of Stan’s hands to open up his arms and chest in a wordless offering to just forget about this, about the scars and the mistakes and the cruelty and the emptiness, if only for a short while. 

And Stan, with a grin splitting his face that doesn’t quite reach his eyes but shines all the same, takes that offering with a boundless lunge into Kyle’s lanky noodle arms, wrapping himself up in the other boy’s gangling appendages and resting his head against his bony chest, nuzzling his face into the soft fabric of his sweater in a way that reminds Kyle maniacally of his boyfriend’s late dog.

And Kyle hugs him close and settles his nose in the boy’s charcoal black hair, taking in the muted scent of the strawberry-and-lavender shampoo Stan uses because, quote, “it’s not fair that girls get to smell all nice and flowery and I’m expected to smell like a jackhammer or some shit. What does that crap even mean? What if  _ I _ wanna smell like a meadow in spring, huh? Ever thought of  _ that _ , marketing strategists?” He presses a soft kiss to Stan’s forehead, just underneath his hairline, and closes his eyes, squeezing his arms tightly enough around the other boy’s torso that he can feel the steady rise and fall of his back as he breathes. 

“I think,” he says audaciously, and perhaps it is the alcohol talking, or perhaps it is the alcohol allowing him to say what his sober self is too much of a rotten, spoiled coward to say, “that it doesn’t matter, when you fell in love with me. Or when I fell in love with you.” Stan hums something akin to agreement into his chest, and Kyle swells with warmth, leaning the side of his head against his boyfriend’s and clinging to him like this is the last chance he’ll ever have to do so. “I love you now, right here, in this moment, and you love me back. I think that’s enough.”

It’s far from the most articulate thing he’s ever said, words slightly slurred and painfully asinine. He’d call himself out for being juvenile and idealistic if it were any other day, it it were any other minute. He’d criticize the oversimplification, the disregard of crucial details and nuances, the harkening of a painstakingly gray situation into the black and white. 

So no, it’s not the most articulate thing he’s ever said. 

But maybe, it’s the most important. 

Stan tilts his head up and catches Kyle’s lips in a delicate, lingering kiss, so helplessly unmoving and constant, as though any disruption he might make could shatter this strange, alien honesty and openness they’ve fostered in a nectarine buzz amidst dark evergreen trees on this quiet November night, while every sane person sleeps indoors underneath cozy warm comforters. And the air is cold but Kyle, for once in his life, is sweltering, exposed and disheveled beneath layers of doubts and fears that he’s sloughed away with one simple, intangible admission. Exposed and naked and  _ loved _ , as he cups Stan’s cheeks with both of his hands and kisses him back with a solid, immovable fervor. 

Stan has always seen the world with rose-tinted lenses, while viewing himself through ones dipped in tar. And Kyle has always made it his mission to find the good in everything, even in ungood things like Stan. 

And maybe that means they are meant to crash and burn. Maybe kids like them don’t get happy endings, die small town hicks just as they were born, as miserable as their parents and their parents’ parents before them. Maybe the world has deemed them from the beginning undeserving of seeing a future that stretches any further than their own backyards.

But maybe none of that matters. 

Because tonight, Stan’s fingers find themselves locked in Kyle’s curls, and Kyle’s hands splay across the small of Stan’s back, and the two boys melt into each other like a loveseat tailor made just for them. Tonight, Kyle tastes only the peach schnapps and cigarettes and peppermint-flavored altoids on Stan’s lips, and Stan hears only the quiet keening hitch of Kyle’s breath as he leaves speckled marks on his pale blemished skin, and all they know is each other, unburdened, unbounded, unsullied by the temperamental nature of the apathetic universe. 

“I love you,” Stan says, and Kyle is whisked back to an unremarkable evening eight years earlier, to sitting on his couch and watching his best friend dial the number on a television screen and speak into the phone’s receiver with the coldest, most hardened look he’s ever seen in the eyes of a ten year old: “kill yourself.” And Kyle smiles a hopeless smile and shuts his eyes and falls in love, over and over and over again. 

“I know,” he says, and laughs a quiet, private laugh, meant only for the ears of the boy in front of him. Laughs and wraps his arms fiercely around the slender, lanky frame of the most important person in his life. “I love you too. Always have.”

**Author's Note:**

> Oof this is NOT my best piece. In my defense, it was written at 1 am and I was sad.


End file.
